I can’t tell you where I was the first time I heard Portishead’s “Sour Times,” maybe because I was immediately swept up in that guitar strum and slow sinister bass line. I was transported into a smoke filled noir-neverland where every dark corner held a secret. The album “Dummy” is a piece of art and mood that exists in a certain era but is simultaneously timeless.

Initially my plan was for this to be the sixth in the series, but I just couldn’t get my head around it. The cover image is slightly pixelated still taken from the video where Beth Gibbons has been tied to a chair and is being interrogated. Its dark, and its small. So I back-burned it thinking it ultimately probably wouldn’t work anyway.

As I was finishing up the Santigold piece, my thoughts kept turning back toward “Dummy.” This album is so much to me, that I just had to make it work. I pulled out the CD again, and gave it stronger consideration. Since the image wasn’t super crisp, I took that as license to be a bit more impressionist with the approach. My design called for 30 different thread colors, oddly, only 3 of which I already had in my kit. Variations in color may be slight, but the result is like a low resolution jpg, familiar, but still a bit off.

I did leave the band name off. It was a similar dilemma I had with The Cure’s “Three Imaginary Boys” where the text was so small, and a few random stitch blobs would not have actually added anything to the overall piece.

Let me know what you think in the comments below, and in the meantime, here is a little behind the scenes action of the production process… to the tune of “Sour Times.”

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